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How To Become a Corporate Coach?
Becoming a corporate coach requires commitment, determination and a willingness to help those in need. While it is a profession that pays well, it is also one that tests your patience and resilience. If you think you have what it takes, do give corporate coaching a try.
- How To Become a Corporate Coach?
- What Is Corporate Coaching?
- What Does A Corporate Coach Do?
- What Are the Benefits of Becoming A Corporate Coach?
- How To Become a Corporate Coach?
- What Qualifications Are Needed to Become A Corporate Coach?
- What Skills Are Required to Be Successful as A Corporate Coach?
- What Are the Certifications to Become A Corporate Coach?
- How Much Does a Corporate Coach Earn?
- What Are Corporate Coaching Methods?
- Tips For Becoming a Corporate Coach
- What Is the Difference Between A Corporate Coach And A Business Coach?
- Conclusion
- Frequently asked questions
What Is Corporate Coaching?
Corporate coaching is a professional relationship between a coach and an employee aimed at improving the latter’s potential and talent. Coaches help and guide employees on how to perform to the best of their abilities according to values and expectations of their organization. Corporate coaching involves the coach holding up a mirror to their client, making them see what their weaknesses are at the grassroot level and working on it to improve them.
What Does A Corporate Coach Do?
A corporate coach works with individuals to help them gain self-awareness, identify their personal goals and develop action plans to achieve these goals. They do not act like therapists or counsellors in that they don’t offer advice or answers to any questions. All they do is ask insightful questions to help clients gain clarity and find solutions to their own problems. Moreover, they challenge assumptions and provide resources to equip their clients with the knowledge and wisdom they need to make their own decisions which will increase the probability of their success.
Corporate coaches conduct interviews, have in-depth discussions and even recommend behavioral assessments to enable clients to identify their strengths and weaknesses who can then play to them and achieve their goals.
What Are the Benefits of Becoming A Corporate Coach?
Corporate coaching does not only help the clients, but it is also beneficial for the coaches. When you are interacting with people from so many different organizations and backgrounds frequently, you are bound to be impacted by those experiences. The main benefits of becoming a corporate coach include:
1. Helps Become a Better Leader
A good coach is one who is experienced. In order to gain experience, you need to provide your service to a few many people. The consultations you hold and the interviews you take with your client, promote two-way learning. That is, you get to learn as much as your client does.
When you are interacting with people from different organizations, you come across different perspectives, some you don’t agree with. Interacting with people with varying personalities helps you become a better leader because you know how to engage people better. The learnings from these experiences can be applied to other ventures in your life in that a good leader has the potential to excel in all team related endeavors.
2. Helps Develop New Skills
As mentioned above, coming across different personalities of people can encourage two-way growth and you can also learn multiple skills. Certifications and qualifications that are required for specialization also come with additional skills such as time management and communication which are helpful in all walks of life. Moreover, dealing with a big number of clients that come with you with their concerns and problems teaches you how to regulate your emotions and impulsive reactions. This is also a valuable skill in stressful and high-pressure situations where you have to make rational decisions.
3. Coaching Can Improve Your Communication Skills
Communication skills are an integral part of the job requirements for a corporate coach. However, this does not mean that you can’t improve on the job. Communication skills are constantly improving and the more experience you gain, the more you can polish them. On the other hand, communication skills are also an important part of the coaching programs that are used for certifications.
4. Coaching Can Increase Your Productivity
When you coach clients that are facing a wide array of problems in their career, you research and get to know of a variety of methods and techniques of managing your workload that you might not have been aware of before. These techniques are applicable to in your own personal life as well. Therefore, coaching clients can also help you become more productive and allow you to become a better version of yourself.
5. Coaching Can Help You Manage Stress and Stay Focused
Once you have a career in coaching, you are more aware of your emotions and how to regulate them. Your mind gets trained on how to channel your energy in a more productive way and manage your mood so that it does not affect your work ethic and, through that, your clients. You begin practicing stress management as a requirement of your job but soon it becomes a habit, and it makes you a better professional overall.
6. Coaching Provides an Opportunity for Growth and Self-Discovery
When you converse with clients about their problems and dilemmas, your job requires you to think out of the box and encourage your clients to think creatively about the solutions. In the way, somewhere, you come across ideologies and methods that you feel are applicable to you. Through this process, it is highly likely that you find the answers to some questions you have been too scared to address. The journey to self-discovery is not always planned but through corporate coaching, you might begin yours.
How To Become a Corporate Coach?
Becoming a corporate coach is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, if you have the motivation to learn are determined to give your business priority, the career has a great deal of potential. Just follow a few steps and you, too, can become a great corporate coach.
First of all, you need to develop a thorough understanding of the business you are stepping into. This comes hand in hand with a vision for your business in terms of the quality you are willing and able to provide. An important point to note is that you are not a consultant. As a corporate coach, you will not give advice to your clients. Instead, you will ask them relevant questions which will give them a sense of direction and figure out the solutions to their problems independently.
Consequently, you need to be able to ask insightful questions. Asking good questions is a skill and there are multiple ways to develop and polish that skills. You can read books on it and even take up courses online which help develop a thought process necessary to ask great questions. Additionally, asking great questions goes hand in hand with being an active, curious listener. Nobody will answer your questions if they don’t feel listened to.
While you are not giving advice to your clients, you should have sufficient expertise to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your clients. For example, if the CEO of a business comes to you with a problem, you should be able to identify whether his decisions regarding the matter have been rational or not. Even if you don’t explicitly mention it to them, you should have the information so you can maneuver the conversation resulting in them figuring out the issue independently.
Above all, when starting a corporate coaching business, you need to have all the qualities of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is willing to take risks for his business and does not let any opportunity for growth pass by. As a corporate coach, you need to be an entrepreneur at heart. You need to be willing to invest your time and money into your business and take important decisions that might not seem easy at first but are in the best interest of your business.
What Qualifications Are Needed to Become A Corporate Coach?
A corporate coach can have a background in psychology, HR or business consultancy. In order to specialize in a particular area, you might need certifications from the International Coach Federation. On the other hand, you can definitely start your career without any formal qualification in the field and gain a reputation for yourself through experience.
What Skills Are Required to Be Successful as A Corporate Coach?
Along with program qualifications and certifications that are required for you to become a corporate coach professionally, there are certain skills that make the good coaches stand out from the bad ones. Some of them are mentioned below.
1. Active Listening
While a corporate coach does not provide therapy or counselling, they should be a good listener. If you do not make an effort to actively listen to and understand the problems your client brings to you, you will not be able to devise a strategy to help them figure out the solutions to them. A corporate coach needs to listen to what their client has to say with an open mind without making any judgements or passing any impulsive remarks.
2. Providing Feedback
Feedback is an important part of the job of a corporate coach. The decisions tour client makes or has made in the past should be evaluated from an outsider perspective and the feedback should be provided to them. It is an effective way to improve their performance and the probability of improving their decisions in the future.
3. Accountability
One of the biggest benefits of hiring a coach is having someone to be accountable to; someone who can keep a check on your progress. You cannot ask for accountability if you cannot provide it yourself. A corporate coach needs to be accountable for their actions because they have an unspoken contract with their clients. The clients are trusting them with their business’ future and they can’t get away with making baseless suggestions that are of no value.
4. Questioning Skills
As mentioned above, the art of asking meaningful questions is highly valuable to a corporate coach. Questioning skills are needed to enable the coach to ask questions that steer the conversation in a certain direction that results in the client figuring out the right way to go about things on their own. If you can’t ask the right questions that increase the clients’ self-awareness, your job as a coach will be incomplete.
5. Experience
As is true for any career, you cannot gain a successful reputation unless you have practical experience. As a corporate coach, experience is especially valuable because each case is unique and the response of the clients to your coaching is important for you to improve further. Only when you’ve had a considerable amount of experience and most of your clients can vouch for you can you make yourself out to be a successful corporate coach.
What Are the Certifications to Become A Corporate Coach?
There are no certifications required for becoming a corporate coach. Any person that has an HR background or has been a corporate consultant can become a corporate coach. However, in order to learn the skills that are necessary to make you a good corporate coach, and specialize in certain areas of the field, you might need to get some certifications from the International Coach Federation (ICF). The ICF offers three levels of certifications: Associate Certified Coach, Professional Certified Coach and Master Certified Coach.
How Much Does a Corporate Coach Earn?
The global coaching industry is valued at a whopping $3billion annually. This is especially because of the recent surge in the demand for the service. A reputable corporate coach can easily earn up to $500 per hour and even more depending on their experience, expertise and the type of clients they are coaching.
What Are Corporate Coaching Methods?
Corporate coaching has a variety of different methods that are unique to each individual in the field. This is because everyone has different experiences in the business world, and everyone has their own learnings from it and a unique way to impart that knowledge. However, there are some basic methods that every coach should use.
- Pre-Session Report
In order to monitor your client’s progress more closely, you should prepare a pre-session report before every session. This is important so that it can be evaluate against the post-session report. These usually include a cognitive aspect intended to highlight the client’s mental state before and after the session. These are not only effective for the client but can also provide the coach with valuable feedback.
- Breathing, Relaxation Exercises
Relaxation exercise prove highly effective because they enable your client to calm down and let go of their stresses before answering any of your questions and making decisions. Having a calm mind is important to avoid impulsive answers and reactions in a session.
Tips For Becoming a Corporate Coach
Corporate coaching is similar to other types of coaching in many ways. All coaches need to be good listeners and to have an open mind. However, corporate coaches are responsible for providing a sense of direction to people who are in the corporate sector. This require specific knowledge about the field so that the clients can be guided in the right direction.
If a corporate coach does not have any idea how a business organization operates, he/she might not be able to ask the relevant questions or provide the level of clarity that the client demands.
Therefore, it is important for a corporate coach to have experience in the business field. If not, they should have sufficient knowledge gained through research or reading books on organization behavior or entrepreneurship to possess an understanding of where their clients are coming from and what their contentions are.
Moreover, a corporate coach needs to have the ability to set goals and then work towards effectively achieving them. Every client is unique, and the level of their progress overtime will be different from each other. As a corporate coach, you need to set individual goals for each of your clients and monitor their progress closely.
What Is the Difference Between A Corporate Coach And A Business Coach?
The main difference between a corporate coach and a business coach is that of their focus. A corporate coach’s prime focus in the individual employee, manager, CEO, etc., whereas a business coach focuses on strategy as a whole. A business coach will not be concerned with the individual progress of the employees as much as the interest of the business as a whole.
Business coaching is better suited to small-scale businesses because their human resource is closely linked, and their individual contribution will directly and greatly impact the organization. On the other hand, corporate coaching helps individuals that are part of the business in making better decisions and coming up with improved solutions to current problems.
Conclusion
In conclusion, becoming a corporate coach is a rewarding job. Helping clients find their passion and providing them with the clarity they need to achieve their goals is doubly beneficial to both parties. Moreover, a corporate coach does not need a special certification to start their career. If you have an interest in the business industry and are willing to help those struggling, corporate coaching in the career for you.
Frequently asked questions
What Does a Corporate Coach Do?
A corporate coach, essentially, holds a mirror in front of their client. They enable them to become self-aware and identify their own strengths and weaknesses and how they can use them to improve their performance.
What Are the Benefits of Working with A Corporate Coach?
A corporate coach can guide you towards the vision you have for your business. They can de-stress your mind and provide you with clarity and a sense of direction that you need to make decisions that are in the best interest of your career.
What Is the Purpose of Hiring a Corporate Coach?
A corporate coach can be hired for a number of reasons including guidance, needing clarity and even gaining an outside perspective on the circumstances that you find yourself in.
ABOUT SAI BLACKBYRN
I’m Sai Blackbyrn, better known as “The Coach’s Mentor.” I help Coaches like you establish their business online. My system is simple: close more clients at higher fees. You can take advantage of technology, and use it as a catalyst to grow your coaching business in a matter of weeks; not months, not years. It’s easier than you think.
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